illustration (attribution, if any possible, is at the end of the article)

Did someone lie to you and hurt you?

Until Enlightenment, the person you see is not the person in front of you. Your mind has filters… which biases your perceptions hence your response. This is specially true when you don't see just the other person but both yourself and the other. Once the 'I' is in the picture, you can ring the alarm bells: try and pay attention to the situation without believing your thoughts.

Contrarily to the naïve belief, you want to be vulnerable to pain: that's when you're open, generous, at peace, responsive… alive. That's when you can experience empathy, when moral causality is as crystal-clear as causality in general… That's when you can act wholesomely, because you accept the risks inherent to engaging.

Thanksgiving anyone?

Who did you thank today? Not out of habit (karma) and tradition [not that there's anything wrong with a habit of gratitude, but if you're not present to it, it's about as grateful as a computer/robot can be], but out of conscious choice and reflecting on your life? Given your circumstances change year on year, do you really think you'd come up every year with the same people to thank?